Anne Austin Pearce: Midwestern Green/Western Blue

We continually move through time and space, never-the-less humans compulsively continue to attempt to arrest this fluctuation. Our desire to construct a sense of home, through architecture, objects, habits, and rituals are acts of distraction wherein we find relief in regularity. This new body of work by, Anne Austin Pearce: Midwestern Green/Western Blue, addresses the idea of home not as a static or singular habitable place but rather as a dynamic experience, found in multiple geographical natural spaces.   For me, the marrow between each place often leaves a great sense of missingness and ache. I recognize this feeling as a desire to keep a thing, a place or experience, in my grasp. While painting, in the studio, internalized and memorialized experiences are called up.  These experiences have been embossed onto my psyche and are realized as color, as paintings. Great green caves of trees, turquoise waves of water, the first green shoots of life pressing out of a frosty earth or the hot yellow / orange / sky with black-shaped silhouettes of palms carved into that brief sky inform these paintings. The title and work in this exhibition describe the luxury of moving between Spring / Summer in Kansas/Missouri and Fall / Winter in California, and the sense of longing for each while away from the other. I suppose, as the saying goes, the grass is greener, and the ocean is blue-er while on each respective side of the geographical fence.  Anne Austin Pearce, 2023       A Midwesterner all her life, Anne Austin Pearce is now pulled by two opposite forces, her love of teaching and nature in California and her family and sense of belonging in Kansas/Missouri.   Pearce has always been adventurous and has traveled the world to experience nature culture in remote, often endangered, and beautiful locations.   Her paintings, mostly abstract, have always sought to express the transitory nature of the natural world and experience in a state of flux.  She has always led with her heart and never more so than in her current exhibition, Midwestern Green/Western Blue.   Anne Austin Pearce’s paintings can be found in the permanent collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, OP, KS; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS; Museum of Art and Design at Miami Date College, FL; Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ and others.  She has participated in numerous artist’s residencies and received a 2015 Lighton International Artists Exchange Program Grant and a 2012 Charlotte Foundation Visual Artist Award.